


The Sky is Falling

by olivemartini



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Minor Character Death, Murphamy - Freeform, Season 1, just read it please
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-06 23:18:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15896160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivemartini/pseuds/olivemartini
Summary: Whatever the hell you want, Bellamy had told him, and he must have liked the sound of it rolling off his tongue, because now he's telling it to everyone else, too.They listen, especially Murphy.Whatever the hell he wants, and down here, he wants to be everything that he never got the chance to be on the Ark.  To be strong.  To be the one in charge.  To be in control.(To be a hero.  To count for something.  To have people he loved who loved him back, but those are secondary reasons.  They will not help him through this.  They would not get him any closer to survival.)





	1. Chapter 1

i.

The first night on the ground, he tries to remember what his father looked like.

The color of his eyes.

The sound of his laugh.

The sharp scent of metal that always clung to his hands, how it stung John's nose whenever he wrapped him into a hug.

( _His father was smart.  Good.   A mechanic.  Not the best one, not an important one, but the job was enough- enough to keep their stomachs full and to make their mother smile and to have Murphy be snuck the occasional present whenever his dad made it down to the trading post.  Things were easier then, before._ )

But he can't.

He can only remember the ending.

 

ii.

That first night on the ground, they are afraid.

It's how Bellamy comes into control really, because while the princess was off finding them water he was the one handing out tents and smiles and giving directions to kids who were just looking for someone to tell them what to do.  They were all kids, really, all of them except for Bellamy, so maybe it was natural that they expected him to have the answers.

( _Spoiler alert: He didn't._ )

He was the only one of them who were not scared, because he was exactly where he wanted to be.

"Why are you down here, anyways?"  Murphy was helping Bellamy drag a deer back to camp.  Not because he really wanted to, but because Bellamy asked him to and John didn't have it in him to say no, not yet.  Now he wishes he had passed the job off to Finn.  It was heavy.  "You aren't one of us."

"My sister,"  Bellamy answered, and John did not know then that the words would become familiar to him over the years, that Bellamy would let the whole world burn down to the ground just to keep Octavia safe.  "My responsibility."

"So you're just here to keep her safe?"  They were at the edge of the clearing.  Murphy didn't want to go back inside, because once he did he would not have Bellamy all to himself anymore.  There would be questions, pleas, worries, problems, and Bellamy would leave to confer with Clarke or Wells or Finn, someone smarter than him.  Murphy isn't a leader.  He's nothing.  No one.  

"Pretty much."  Bellamy flashed a grin in his direction and shouldered the kill on his own.  At the time, Murphy thought he was doing it to be nice, shouldering that burden on his own, but now Murphy knows better- He wanted to be the hero.  He wanted to take all the credit, to show people that he is the reason that they are alive.  And one day that would be true, but not today.  "It's a full time job."

Murphy knew all about them- the girl under the floor and the brother that got her caught.   For a moment, he wants to ask which of them was more guilty- the one who killed their mother for the sake of someone else or the one who killed their father just so he could have a chance to live, but he doesn't.  John's pretty sure he already knows the answer.

"What do I do?"  Murphy's not sure what he's asking him, if he wants to know what to do in the moment or in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn't mater.  He'll take any direction that could be given to him.  "I've got no one."

Bellamy smiles at him again, but this time it's a little sad.  "Whatever the hell you want."

 

 

iii.

 _Whatever the hell you want,_ Bellamy had told him, and he must have liked the sound of it rolling off his tongue, because now he's telling it to everyone else, too.

They listen, especially Murphy.

Whatever the hell he wants, and down here, he wants to be everything that he never got the chance to be on the Ark.  To be strong.  To be the one in charge.  To be in control.

( _To be a hero.  To count for something.  To have people he loved who loved him back, but those are secondary reasons.  They will not help him through this.  They would not get him any closer to survival._ )

 

 

 

iv.

 It's his idea to take off the bracelets.

Not because he wants to.  The others of the hundred assume the ark sent them down as lambs to slaughter just for the fun of it, but Murphy knows better.  He had heard stories of Abby Griffin.  She would not have sent her daughter down to die if there was any other way for her to survive.

( _His father had told him things about the early days.  About oxygen scrubbers that glitch and entire hallways suffocating in their sleep.  Of days where they ran out of food and did what they had to.  About doors that don't close and being sucked out into space without meaning to be.  They were scary stories to keep him distracted from the monster Murphy had thought was hiding in the closet, but they taught him something else, too- this was an old ship.  And when machines grow old, they break.  So maybe it was better for all of them, to be down on the ground.)_

He didn't come up with the idea because he thought the ark had damned them.  He did it because Bellamy finally told him the truth.

"I shot the chancellor to get here."  Murphy did not ask, but Bellamy gives the explanation anyways.  "If they come down here, they kill me."

And Murphy didn't want that.  It might have been worrisome, but he liked the idea of someone that would do whatever it took to keep the people he loved safe.  At the time, he had been under the impression that he was on his way to becoming one of them.

"Then don't give them a reason to come down."   _I didn't know,_ he would tell himself later, when he heard about the culling and the people that died so their children might live. _I didn't know what I was doing.  I was only a child.  I was only a child, I was only doing what it took.  Please forgive me._   "Make them think they can't."

"How?"

He wasn't smart, Bellamy.  Not then, not yet.  That would come with time, after they learned to stop looking at things in shades of grey and started seeing what really mattered- live or die.  Making choices was easy, given the alternative.

Murphy smiles, raises his arm so the firelit flashes against the bracelet.  "We die."

 

vi.

We die, he had said, like it was something simple, but it wasn't.

It's not soft.  It's not gentle.  It's harsh and bloody and sometimes it comes at the hand of someone that you had thought was your best friend, someone you already were planning to be ready to die for, someone you thought that you could have been happy with loving, even if they didn't love you back.

Sometimes, most of the time, life isn't fair.

Sometimes, you tell the truth, and no one believes you.

"Please,  He says, and the words fall out of his mouth with the blood from his split lip.  He is begging, even though he promised himself that down here he would be strong, he would be safe, he would never have to be scared again because Bellamy was here to protect him with the same intensity that he protects his sister, but that was before Wells body showed up with John's knife beside it.  "Please, Bellamy, you can't believe this."

But he did.

 

 

vii.

They stop.

They stop because someone else confesses. 

They stop because apparently it was some little girl who Bellamy told to slay her demons so they could not scare her anymore, another lost soul that reminded him a bit more of his sister than Murphy must have even though they were both equally alone, because this time, he does not try to kill her.

"Don't."  She is crying. You don't expect murderers to cry.  Murphy wondered how she did it, if Wells saw it coming.  He hopes that it was fast, for both their sakes.  "I did it.  I killed him."

( _How could you kill someone, Octavia had asked him, after they had sat around a campfire and listened to all of their new friends list out their sins.   Some of them were bad and some of them weren't, but they all got placed down here just the same.   I can't even imagine it._

_I know how, he wanted to tell her.  Start at the week after your fifth birthday.  Get sick.  Choke on the fluid filling your lungs and vomit blood into your mothers lap.  Don't understand when your father says he is going to save you, because you had heard the doctor say that you were going to die.  When he steals the medicine, choke it down._

_Get better.  Watch your father get floated.  Learn from your mother that he stole the wrong thing.  Learn that you got better on your own and spend the rest of your life wishing that you had had the strength to die just a little bit sooner._ )

How do you kill someone?  He knows now.  You get angry.  You get desperate.  And the lead up feels a bit like this.

 

viii.

Charlotte throws herself off a cliff.

Murphy gets banished.

The grounders find him on the fourth day.

 

ix.

They stick him in a cage, which is bad.

It was even worse when they took him out.

"Please,"  He had said, with the blood streaming from his mouth and his chest and his hands.  This was more pain than he thought was possible, more pain than he thought he could take, and the worst part is that he could tell that they were good at it- knew when to push an when to fall back, how much he could take before he breaks.  "No more."

They were going to kill him.  He knew it, from the first time they sliced him open with that knife of his, when he watched his skin shred and tear and split, over and over and over again.  The only question was when.

 

 

x.

He lasts three days.

 _You said that you would protect me._ He is thinking of Bellamy, of the plans he would make and how he would not come home until he has enough food for them all, even when that was not possible.  That night they got stuck in the rainstorm and he stripped off his jacket just because Murphy was cold.  How he promised to keep them all safe, whatever it took, never mind what it cost him to get there.  Maybe he thought that saving them would wash away the blood staining his hands.   _You said that you would keep me safe._

 _You called us your people,_ and this time it is Clarke that he sees, the way she smiled when the rain fell and how even though the rest of them had taken time to feel like kids for the first time in their lives, she hadn't, just kept checking the time on her beaten up wrist watch and staring up into the night sky, like she's wondering how long she will have to shoulder the burden of all these lives.   _Why does that not mean me?_

 _I'm so sorry._ He did not get to bury Wells.  He wishes that he would have.  Bellamy had him bury all the rest.   _I'm so sorry you had to die for the sins of your father._

 _That was not how it should have ended for you,_ he thinks, and even though he was not there he can see the way that Charlotte throws herself over the side of that cliff, the way her body must have crumpled.   _But it's better than this.  Better than being in a cage._

And then, finally, the last one, the one he swore he wouldn't think of but always does.   _You were right,_ and he sees his mother's face, how she wrapped her fingers around his wrist and clawed at his face in her last moments, fighting against the end even though she had been the one to open the door.   _I'd do anything to survive, no matter who it hurts._

Three days, and he tells them everything they needed to know.

 

 

 

xi.

They let him go free.

The cage was open, and Murphy doesn't care anymore if he lives or dies so long that he is not trapped in here, so he walks out.  And when no one stops him, he runs, all the way back to the drop ship where he collapsed at Bellamy's feet, right where he had started.

He didn't know that he was sick.

Not that anyone believes him.

 

 

xii.

They don't trust him anymore and it's not fair.

It's not fair because he had not done anything wrong, and Bellamy is angry at him for telling the truth because he thinks that he could have held out longer.  It's alright, because he does not understand who the grounders are and what they can do, and after everything, Murphy still never wants him to be in the situation where he understands.  

He still wants him to be safe.

( _Not that he needs any help with that now.  Murphy used to be his right hand man but now that spot has been taken over by Clarke, and she takes up so much more room than Bellamy had ever even thought to give him.  She gets to be an equal.  Watching them, its the first time that John ever realized that he wasn't.)_

 

 

 

xiii.

A fact: love dies.

Everything dies, but especially that, and when it does something else fills its place, something bitter, something angry, something that wants to watch everyone be hurt just so you don't have to listen to your own pain anymore.

All Murphy has is pain, ever since that day he was drowning in his own body and his father went flying out the dropship because he tried to save him.

He's done.

 

xiv.

It's a mark of how selfish he is that Murphy is still willing to do this.

There's about to be a war.  A war that the kids need Bellamy to help them fight, because as much as Murphy might resent it now, he was one of the only reasons that they were all still alive.  And yet.

He can't get it out of his head.  Of the screams, the rope, the way it tightened around his neck and that crate being kicked out beneath his feet, how even though he thought he knew what it meant to suffocate this was so much worse than he remembered.  How even as he was swinging there, he was sort of okay with it, because at least he had proved to everyone that they were wrong, that they didn't get to leave the Ark behind.

They could pretend things were different, but they were still the same.  Still stuck with leaders who don't know the meaning of mercy.  Still having their choices taken away from them and calling it protection.

Murphy thought that he could be different, too, but he wasn't.   He had destroyed his life for a chance at revenge once, up on the ark, when he burned up that cabin of the man who arrested his father.  ( _He didn't know that the wife was home sick from work that day.  How could he?  He ran back in to save her once he heard the screams, but no one ever seems to care about that._ )   

An eye for an eye.  A life for a life.  And he was about to do it again.

 


	2. Chapter 2

i.

He's a coward for two reasons.

The first is that he runs.  He strings Bellamy up and screams out his anger like that might leech the poison out of his veins, kicks the crate out from under his feet and watches his legs flail around, expecting the entire time to feel better once the scales had been tipped back into balance, but he doesn't.   All that happens is he finds out that he doesn't have what it takes to be a murderer and he has to run, but not before he shoots Raven with the rifle he had stole.

The second reason is he comes back.

 

 

ii.

It was quiet, after.

He didn't expect it to be.  He thought it would be loud, full of moans and groans and battle cries, someone kneeling on the muddy earth with their face titled to the sky and pouring out their grief in a sound that's barely human.  He thought it would be drawn out, that the fight wouldn't end, and that when it did end, someone would have won.  That's what they always made it sound like, up there on the ark, where the only enemy they fought against was themselves and war was something out of the old films they played on Saturday nights.

Murphy had never known war before.

He didn't expect it to be like this, all burned bodies and silence.  

 

 

iii.

"I don't want to die,"  Raven says, after she had tried to shoot him, after she almost chokes on her own blood based vomit, after she had spewed her venom and he had told her what he had done to his father just because he wanted to tell  _someone_ before everyone he ever knew disintegrated into the earth, and also maybe because he wants her to understand, just a little bit, what it was like to find trust after a life like that and then have that trust ripped away.  

"You're not going to die,"  is what he says, automatically, cradling her head in his lap, his hands buried in her hair, but he knows its not the truth, because her eyes are not very focused and the bloods a funny color and he does not think Raven would let him be this close if she really had her wits about her, did not think she would be admitting to being this afraid.  "I'm not going to let you die."

"Why not?"  She blinks up at him.  He remembers being so angry at her, once, angry because she fell from the sky and took up another bit of space that John had been trying so hard to occupy, another person who thought he was stupid and a leech and not worth their time, just another soldier meant to take orders.  And also because she slept with Bellamy.  He hadn't liked that at all.  "You're the one shot me."

"I didn't mean to."

"I meant to.  When you walked into the drop ship." She had.  He had expected it, too, but he walked in anyways.  John wonders what that said about him.  "I'm sorry about that."

"Don't be,."  He tightens his grip on her like that could make her stay.  "It's a survivors move."

 

 

iv.

For a second -just a second- he thinks he should choose being a good person over being a survivor, even telling the doc to take care of Raven before she checks him, but then Bellamy's arms are around his waist in a sort of rugby tackle and John hits the ground so hard it cuts his head open right at the base of it, screaming about past sins that had ben wiped away from Murphy's mind and it goes back to surviving.

 _I haven't done anything wrong,_ he wants to scream, when Kane shoves him into their makeshift jail with those zip ties digging into his wrists so tight the blood is humming in his fingers.   _You think I've made mistakes?  Talk to him.  He threw that radio in the ocean, he caused the culling.   If we were on the ark, you would have sent him flying out into the sky while he screams and I'm the monster just for trying to commit the crime I got punished for?_

He almost believes it, too, right until that knife digs into Raven's back and he spends the day listening to her screams, and that night being terrified when the sounds finally stop.

 

 

v.

It's a rescue mission of sorts, and he's part of it.

It's funny, in a way that it isn't funny, how he always ends up being wrapped up in these kinds of things.  At first it was because he thought Bellamy was the sun that his world revolved around or something poetic like that, but now it was just that he was, for better or worse, part of the 100, and suddenly the 100 went from being kids to warriors that walked right out of a storybook.

He just happened to be the only member of the 100 besides Octavia who'd ever walked into grounder territory and made it back out alive.

"Do I get a gun?"  He's talked just to talk, not because he thinks anyone else is going to respond, but then Bellamy is there, shoving Murphy forward with the butt of the gun, so light it's almost gentle if not for the way it made him stumble.  Murphy remembers a time where Bellamy would have wanted him closer, used his strong hands to draw him back, half rough and half gentle like he couldn't ever make up his mind whether or not Murphy was something he wanted to take care of.

"No."

"Come on."  His hands are still tied.  He's going to killed, but Murphy finds that he isn't that upset.  He owes it to Clarke to try and find her.  And he doesn't want to be in that camp when Raven finally makes it out of surgery.  He doesn't think he can take the guilt, but the weight is becoming familiar.  "I promise not to try and kill you."

"Again, you mean."  Bellamy's voice is rough and angry, stretched too thin.  The others might be fooled but Murphy knows that he's fighting back a smile.  Bellamy always laughed at his jokes, even when they weren't funny.  

 

 

vi.

They don't find Clarke, but they find someone else.

A girl.  A friend.  Someone who doesn't know what Murphy had done, who does not hate him, but would soon enough.  

Still, he's excited, too see someone else, and he doesn't doubt for a moment that they'd be able to save her, so he throws himself down in the dust to wait until she gets hauled up over the ridge, only it doesn't happen- the rope snaps and this guy he'd never talked to plunges down to the ropes below, gets himself killed and the girl will not stop screaming, does not stop until Bellamy wraps a different rope around his waist and promises to save her.

"Bellamy,"  John says, and the name is so quiet that it barely even makes it out of his throat, but John cannot help himself.  "Don't."

It's quiet, but he still hears, and they meet eyes over the heads of the others, and John sees that familiar look in his eyes, the one that means  _I'm sorry, I am, but I have to._

So he goes down.  And the rope holds, until it doesn't, and then it's John and Finn and the girl holding them both up, until the grounder hits her in the leg with an arrow and it is only John, John who is not strong enough and who does not want to die, his hands burning and bleeding and cut open from the rope and fully intending to go over the side of this cliff before he even thinks about letting go, because this is Bellamy, damn it, and Bellamy is important, Bellamy is special, Bellamy is still his safe place after everything and he has not given up hope that he'll get to find that again.

When he sees them come up over the ridge, the look on Bellamy's face is almost worth the pain.

 

 

vii.

"How's the hands?"  He thinks its Abby even though the voice is clearly male, because no one else would think to ask about them, but then he squints into the darkness and finds Bellamy towering over him.  When John doesn't answer, Bellamy sinks to the ground and sits beside him, both their backs pressed to the drop ship.  "Finn said they were pretty screwed up."

They hurt.  Bad.  All the skin was ripped off.  That's a bad thing to happen when you live in the wild.  You need your hands to live.

"They suck."  He holds them out for proof and even that motion hurts.  "But it got you two over that cliff, so I guess it was worth it."

"Yeah."  They seem to have run out of words.  Bellamy would never run out of words before- would tell stories and talk strategy and say meaningless things just to fill the air between him, until Murphy just couldn't take it anymore and left.  "Thanks, for that."

"I'm sorry."  For so much, but he wasn't going to apologize for all of that.  What they had done to each other disappeared the moment he hauled Bellamy over that cliff, and they both knew it.  "That we couldn't find Clarke."

"Not your fault."  Gruff.  Defensive.  It's his hiding something voice.

"Still."  Murphy does not know when to stop himself.  "I know how much she meant to you."

"She means a lot to everyone."

Murphy laughs, even though it is not funny.  He doesn't want to make fun, not really.  He's not bitter of this- Bellamy and Clarke are two sides of the same coin.  They're the only reason they made it through.  They deserve each other.  He's not going to make her absence worse by pressing the issue further.

"Whatever you say, man.  But next time?"  Murphy dips down and steals Bellamy's drink and neither of them make a move to have it returned.  He can't remember if that's new or normal.  "I'm so getting a gun."

 

 

viii.

 _I'm getting a gun,_ he had said, and it comes back to haunt him, because he had gotten a gun but it hadn't done him any good.

He had just stood there.  Stood there and watched, and yeah, he tried to tell him to stop, but for the most part he let Finn do whatever he wanted.  He let him do what he wanted because he knew this was just because he loved Clarke and he knows how it makes people a little desperate sometimes, but also because Finn was the man who called for peace talks over war and he hadn't expected him to do anything all that bad.

He hadn't expected him to do anything bad, and once he started, what was Murphy supposed to do?  The only thing he could do was shoot him, and he couldn't do that, not when Finn had been the only one to try and save his life.  

So he watches.  Watches the blood, and the bullets, and hears the sound of the gun firing, over and over and over, at children and old folks and women, people who were not fighters and thinks that he should have seen this coming, should have seen this coming since Finn shot the man with Clarke's watch, and Murphy wonders if he's going to spend the rest of his life making mistakes this badly.

That was bad, the massacre, seeing the bodies fall and the mud turn red and screaming himself hoarse trying to make it stop.

Watching Clarke come over that ridge just in time to see it all happen, have Finn turn to her and exhale out words like a prayer, grip her arms and say "I found you" like she was the only thing in life he ever wanted?  That was worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come find me on Instagram @olive.writes.fanfic

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on Instagram @olive.writes.fanfic


End file.
